"My precious" - why IT/IM should not be like Gollum

(c) MGM 212

With the impending realse of the film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit in the UK, I was reminded of the character Gollum's attitude to the One Ring. He described it as "my precious" despite the fact it had distorted his mind and was gardually killing him. Whilst such an attitude to something you possess and control is a bit extreme, many CIOs, CTOs and even CFOs, take the same view of their information management/IT provision. 

I am the first to champion the call that information is an organisation's most important asset, but that does not mean I agree that the organisation is always the best to manage and explot that asset.

I keep my money in a bank, I pay my local mechanic to service my car, so why, if I were still a CIO/CTO, would I have issues about asking better resouced, focussed and trained professionals to provide my information management/IT capability?

There are 9 questions/myths about managed services/outsourcing and cloud provision that I regularly have to address - and burst.

Gollum didn't have a happy end in Lord of the Rings. Neither will CIOs/CTOs who do not prioritise delivery over (percieved) control.

FAST enterprise search is back - and doing it in Norway

Further to the Microsoft SharePoint 2012 Conference held in Vegas in mid November, Norwegian search solutions company Comperio has been running a series of events around Europe. In London Bjorn Olstad, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and a key acquisition when Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer, confirmed that Microsoft is lifting search out of SharePoint and that enterprise search development will be headquartered in Norway, where the company is intending to recruit 50 people.
This is highly strategic good news, and for me confirms the line that Bjorn (and I from an independent perspective) have been saying for at least the last six years, "search is the new portal".